Vehicle washing services have been known for decades. Generally, such washing services utilize automated washing machines that are designed to wash particular portions of the vehicles. For example, vertical surfaces of the vehicle body are normally washed using a relatively large and long brush rotating about a generally vertical axis that washes those surfaces as the vehicle moves through the washing station. The vehicle is either driven or conveyed through the washing station.
Other special washing machines are designed to clean the vehicle's tires as it moves through the washing station. Such tire washing machines often use a long brush that is rotating with respect to a horizontal axis and is moved into contact with the vehicle tires by a cylinder or other means. Washing and rinsing fluids are sprayed through a common nozzle onto the tire, the rotating brush or both. While such machines are effective at removing dirt from the tires, after the wash, the tires are generally a flat color that is not visually attractive. Further, the nature of the tire material causes them to again quickly collect dirt and look even less attractive.
For many years, there have been commercially available coatings that are manually applied to vehicle tires to substantially improve their appearance and make them more dirt resistant. In the environment of a full service vehicle cleaning business, the requirement of having to manually apply the coating is labor intensive, expensive and adds valuable time to a vehicle cleaning cycle. Further, manually applied coatings may be inconsistently applied especially at the area where the tire meets the ground. Thus, there is a need for an apparatus and method for automatically applying such a coating to tires after they have been cleaned.